Quick question for anyone who might know... Is Ozone - O3 itself - by definition "plasma"? My understanding is that it exists as a "charged gas", and I assume that if it relinquished its charge it would degrade into O2 and (I assume) monatomic oxygen.

If it is plasma, and I'm really hoping someone can confirm or negate that assumption, but if it is - wouldn't that go a long way towards explaining the "hole" or thin area over the South Pole? I mean, don't we see the same torus-like plasma behavior again and again around globes?

"The ancients possessed a plasma cosmology and physics themselves, and from laboratory experiments, were well familiar with the patterns exhibited by Peratt's petroglyphs." -- Joseph P. Farrell, author, 2007

I'm thinking "electrically charged gas" would cover it, although I should probably be more detailed. My question is basically since (as I understand it, and hope I'm not wrong or this whole question is moot) Ozone is by its nature an electrically charged gas, does it not then behave as a plasma - because it is one?

This isn't a rhetorical question - I honestly don't know if Ozone is a plasma or not - but it seems to me that it should be...

I have no idea where I saw the info or in what article, but I'm pretty sure that I saw someone mention that ozone is a 'heavy gas', and it was under discussion as to how it can hang up there in an 'ozone layer' in the first place if gravity was pulling it down through less dense atmosphere.The point being was that the 'ozone layer' was thus a 'plasma layer' conforming to the magnetic field in a double layer in the atmosphere, or something along that line, anyway... :\

Mike H.

"I have no fear to shout out my ignorance and let the Wise correct me, for every instance of such narrows the gulf between them and me." -- Michael A. Harrington

This thread, "Earth Aurora's", is a composite of the following threads:"Anomalous "Figure" in Aurora""earths spaceshocks (spacequakes)""Aurora Pictures""'Jellyfish' in the aurora is a petroglyph-like phenomena""Colliding Auroras Produce Explosions of Light""Aurora with No Solar Wind""Plasma Bullets Spark Northern Lights""Theta Aurora"

Recently I have been reading "The Autobiography of Science," published in 1945 (Doubleday), and edited by R. Moulton and J. Schifferes. The book is a combination of short bio information about important people in science followed by original writings by that same person in their field of work.

Of interest I believe is this comment about John Dalton ( 1766-1844 ). "Further, he kept a meteorological diary and was familiar enough with the phenomena of electricity to assert, correctly, in 1793 that the aurora borealis, that colorful display of northern lights, was electrical in origin."

John Dalton was an important scientist in the advancement of chemistry and the study of color blindness, which has been called "Daltonism".

I Think it would be a good idea to "fill in", so to speak, the history of the belief in the electrical nature of our surrounding environment, especially from those people that have standing in the "scientific community".

Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality. -Nikola Tesla -1934

Here, a two-stage suborbital rocket rips across the auroras over Alaska. The small rocket was launched by scientists Saturday as part of a NASA-backed study into how auroras can affect signals coming to and from satellites and spacecraft. Scientists hope to better understand the way space weather impacts our electrical systems on Earth and in orbit in order to possibly mitigate those effects as the sun builds toward its solar maximum in 2013.

The team used a 46-foot sounding rocket (known as a Terrier-Black Brant) to gather data across a 6-mile-thick layer of the Earth’s upper atmosphere where incoming charged particles from the sun interact with the Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere.

"It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.""Doubt is not an agreeable condition, but certainty is an absurd one.""Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities." Voltaire

Specks of meteor smoke act as gathering points where water molecules can assemble themselves into ice crystals. The process is called "nucleation."

Nucleation happens all the time in the lower atmosphere. In ordinary clouds, airborne specks of dust and even living microbes can serve as nucleation sites. Tiny ice crystals, drops of water, and snowflakes grow around these particles, falling to Earth if and when they become heavy enough.

Nucleating agents are especially important in the ethereal realm of NLCs. The clouds form at the edge of space where the air pressure is little more than vacuum. The odds of two water molecules meeting is slim, and of sticking together slimmer still.

Meteor smoke helps beat the odds. According AIM data, ice crystals can grow around meteoritic dust to sizes ranging from 20 to 70 nanometers. For comparison, cirrus clouds in the lower atmosphere where water is abundant contain crystals 10 to 100 times larger.

The Norusca II hyperspectral camera was tested in late January at the Kjell Henriksen Observatory, where it imaged a major solar flare that jettisoned a burst of high-energy particles known as a coronal mass ejection (CME). This new phenomenon produced magnificent auroras—nature’s celestial fireworks—when it eventually slammed into the Earth’s magnetic field.

“Our new all-sky camera opens up new frontiers of discovery and will help in the detection of auroras and the understanding of how our sun impacts the atmosphere here on Earth,” said Fred Sigernes of the University Center in Svalbard.

The aurora as seen as a color composite image from the Norusca II camera. Three bands were combined to make the image. Each band was assigned a different color — red, green and blue — to enhance the features of the aurora for analysis. The research from the University Center in Svalbard could help scientists to better understand how the sun impacts the Earth’s atmosphere. Courtesy of Optics Express.

The space-weather researchers imaged the aurora with unprecedented clarity through a layer of low-altitude clouds, which would have thwarted earlier-generation instruments. The camera also revealed something unexpected: a very faint wave pattern of unknown origin in the lower atmosphere. The wave pattern resembles “airglow” — the natural emission of light by Earth’s atmosphere. Airglow can be produced by a variety of known sources, including chemical reactions and cosmic rays striking the upper atmosphere.

“After the January CME, we think we saw an auroral-generated wave interaction with airglow,” Sigernes said. This would be an entirely new phenomenon and, if confirmed, would be the first time airglow has been associated with auroras.

“Additional development and commissioning will also hopefully verify our intriguing first results,” he said.

The red arrow points to the unidentified low-intensity wave pattern, which the researchers suspect is an auroral-generated wave interaction with airglow. For contrast, the blue arrow points to the faint emission of the Milky Way. Courtesy of Optics Express.

Current cameras used to study such atmospheric phenomena collect all the light together into one image; they lack the ability to separately capture and analyze multiple slivers of the visible spectrum. This means that researchers wanting to study specific bands or small portions of an aurora’s spectrum would have to use a series of filters to block out the unwanted wavelengths.

The Norusca II can achieve the same result without any moving parts, using its advanced optics to switch among all of its 41 separate optical bands in a matter of microseconds — orders of magnitude faster than an ordinary camera. This opens up new possibilities for discovery by combining specific bands of the same ethereal phenomenon into one image, revealing previously hidden details. This form of multispectral imaging also will enable scientists to better classify auroras from background sky emissions and study the way they cluster in the atmosphere.

Students perform measurements of the aurora in front of the Kjell Henriksen Observatory in Svalbard, Norway, November 2010. Courtesy of Njaal Gulbarndsen.

“A standard filter wheel camera that typically uses six interference filters will not be able to spin the wheel fast enough compared to the Norusca II camera,” Sigernes said. “This makes the new hyperspectral capability particularly useful for spectroscopy, because it can detect specific atmospheric constituents by their unique fingerprint, or wavelengths, in the light they emit.”

Details on the camera and results of its first images were published in the open-access journal Optics Express.

NASA's IMAGE and Cluster Missions Reveal Origin of Theta Auroras Known as a theta aurora -- because seen from above it looks like the Greek letter theta, an oval with a line crossing through the center -- this type of aurora sometimes occurs closer to the poles than normal aurora. While the genesis of the auroral oval emissions is reasonably well understood, the origin of the theta aurora was unclear until now. A paper in the Dec. 19, 2014, issue of Science shows that hot plasma funneled into near-Earth space from the sun helps cause these unique aurora.The mystery was finally solved by studying data collected simultaneously by the Cluster and IMAGE spacecraft on Sept. 15, 2005. While the four Cluster satellites were located in the southern hemisphere magnetic lobe, IMAGE had a wide-field view of the southern hemisphere aurora. As one Cluster satellite observed uncharacteristically energetic plasma in the lobe, IMAGE saw the arc of the theta aurora cross the magnetic footprint of Cluster.The team found that the energetic plasma appeared on high-latitude magnetic field lines that had been closed by the process of magnetic reconnection driven by the northward pointed fields. This in turn caused the plasma to become relatively hot. Such observations support the idea that theta aurora are due to plasma trapped inside the magnetosphere, rather than material being directly pushed in from the solar wind.

"Solving the question of the origin of the theta aurora required Cluster’s high inclination orbit that sweeps over the region where the aurora are generated together with the imaging capability of IMAGE, which is no longer functioning," said Melvyn Goldstein, Cluster project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "Hopefully, future missions will give comparable capabilities to view the polar regions of the magnetosphere."

The illusion from which we are seeking to extricate ourselves is not that constituted by the realm of space and time, but that which comes from failing to know that realm from the standpoint of a higher vision. -L.H.